China And India Textile Clothing Export Competitiveness Comparative Analysis

The development of the textile industry can not only alleviate the pressure of acountry’s employment, increase national output and foreign exchange reserves,stabilize exchange rate, but also can provide new products and processes, bringinnovation and upgrading to other industries, then promote other industries to developand produce a powerful driving force of the new industry. China and India are theworld’s most important textile manufacturing and trading countries, but also textileindustry as an important pillar industry plays an important role in the nationaleconomy.The lifting of the “Multi-Fibre Agreement”, the textile and apparel trade quotasare canceled, the world textile and clothing trade being at the direction of integrationdevelopment. With the readjustment of the international textile and apparel tradesystems, the various tariff and non-tariff trade barriers become to the primary meansof management of the national textile trade; the competitive situation of theinternational textile market has also under gone a drastic change in developed anddeveloping countries and developing countries more intensive competition betweenthe international textile market. India as the world’s second-largest textile producerand exporter after China, with the inherent advantages and conditions of thedevelopment of the textile industry (such as cheap labor, abundant raw materials,fast-growing market, etc.), while the Chinese textile industry labor and textile rawmaterial costs rising and frequent foreign trade barriers,which made India hasbecome a competitor of the Chinese textile industry development, has formed acertain competitive pressure to Chinese textile industry development.This paper will use international trade theory, according to the capability ofexploit the international market to measure the international competitiveness ofChinese and Indian textile and apparel industry. First, from the theory of absoluteadvantage, theory of comparative advantage, factor endowment theory, growth theory of the new elements of the product life cycle theory, economies of scale, demandpreference similarity theory and the theory of competitive advantage, trying to findexport competitiveness from which factors. Then described the current situation ofChinese-Indian textile and apparel exports, and a comparative analysis. And then usethe evaluation of related products export competitiveness to expand the empiricalresearch on the two countries’ textile and apparel export competitiveness.Through analysis, the conclusions reached in this article are: the proportion ofIndia’s textile and garment exports in total exports, export growth, internationalmarket share is lower than in China; While Chinese textile and garment exportstructure and export destinations similar with Indian in a certain extent; Chineseclothing exports shows more competitive than India, textile raw materials, cotton andchemical fiber in India shows more export competitiveness. Facing the competitionsfrom domestic adverse various elements and foreign other textile exporting countries,China wants to continue consolidating and improving the status of the textile andgarment exports in the international market, the relevant enterprises should be effortstowards the following aspects: increase the research and development efforts on rawmaterials, improve value-added products, establish the textile industry cluster, andadhere to the sustainable development of the textile industry, promote thediversification of export markets, expand foreign investment.Should be noted that, because of the different importance due to different sharein the export trade of various products of the textile industry, the research methods inthis paper select only the HS code of the two countries export larger amount of fivechapters of goods. Chapter52(cotton woven fabric), Chapter54(chemical fiberfilament yarn and woven fabrics), Chapter55(staple fibers and woven fabrics),Chapter61(knitted or crocheted clothing) and Chapter62(not knitted or crochetedclothing), and calculated above goods’ value about comparable net export index,revealed comparative advantage index, revealed competitive advantage indices andexport growth.